Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Two days to Christmas, and the nose is still firmly to the grindstone. It looks like we might finally be centering in on the problem with the datalogger, and that it might be caused by a faulty component. A replacement is being sent to us via another person from my lab, who is leaving France to come here on December 30th. We are keeping our fingers crossed that they will both arrive ok.

Christmas seems to be a big affair out here. We have two trees covered with tinsel in the dining room (trees?? on the Antarctic plateau?), and plenty of foil-based decorations strewn on the walls and dropping from the ceiling, accumulating static electricity and zapping every other person than walks by. Someone has decided that Christmas music should be played during meals... personally, I think that is going a bit too far...

We are going to have a special Christmas dinner tomorrow night. We are supposed to stop work at 4pm, in order to get ourselves washed and prettified for the evening (the cooks have requested that we be smartly dressed, which given the effort they are putting into making the dinner is only fair). We start with an apéritif at 7:30 (we have been strongly encouraged to attend - maybe that means they will break out the last of the Champagne ??), then go on to dinner and a Christmas Eve party.

I'm charging my camera batteries this evening so as to be able to send you pictures of the event. For now you will have to make do with this picture of me walking back from the seismic shelter (the yellow blob in the background). The sky is blue and featureless, the snow is white, featureless and flat, and there is a lot of both. That's Dome C for you: nothing as far as the eye can see... spectacular!

Posted by
Alessia Maggi

1 comment:

I wish you a merry christmas and an happy new year. That must be a little strange to see so much stuff around christmas in the emptiness of Antartica. This continent doesn't seem apaprt from the world from this point of view (it just lacks the lalls end shops).I wish you plenty of success during this mission and plenty of good and interesting data sets.